The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
Most network switching systems support unicast network traffic flows directed at particular targets, multicast traffic flows directed at groups of targets, and broadcast traffic flows directed at every host in the network. In these systems, and especially in application to larger networks, it is difficult to efficiently utilize processing power, memory, and other resources to process multicast traffic flows.